Wednesday, November 16

Fragment 19

I'm trying to sleep, but I keep staying awake. I watch late night infomercials for things I will never buy. This isn't living. I need to get back to my life. But I need to find out what happened to me. God, I need to know.

There was a flash of light and one of the drones exploded in a fiery inferno. A voice shouted, "Run, you fools!"

We ran. I tried not to look back, but finally my curiosity got the better of me and I saw a man standing in the rain, hood over his face, slicing into drones with what looked like a sword.

And then the power went down again. <<Sorry!>> Guillemet said. <<I thought you guys would have been done by now. The code was only programmed for five hours. I'm rerunning it from the beginning.>>

"Thanks," I whispered. I handed the drive to Canto and asked him, "Who was that guy?"

"No idea," he said. "I thought you knew him."

A new player. Someone else. Someone who wanted us to succeed. Or at least live long enough to achieve an objective. I couldn't trust them. I could only trust me. Me and Canto and Guillemet.

Just me. Paranoia is another symptom. Was it becoming worse? I looked around, trying to see if the Slender Man popped up anywhere. There was no sign of him. Good.

Back at the safe house, we plugged the drive in. All of the data was encrypted again, this time with an encryption that Guillemet hadn't written. Canto would have to decode it one file at a time with pharm-codes he had learned. There was only one problem: the data was massive. Not as massive as the Archive, but incredibly big. It could take months to decode it all. And we didn't even know if we would find anything useful in it.

Canto started on the decoding, while I flipped the cloudscreen on and checked if there was any updates on the hunt of the "fugitives," i.e. us. There wasn't anything interesting, except for one site that tried to interview my brother.

"No comment," he said. Like all our history, all the pain I had caused him was nothing. "No comment." And he went back to station house and probably wrote up a report on all the criminals he had caught that day and the newsite ran some headline that said, "Criminal Mastermind's Brother Is Police Officer; Is This Irony?" Or they would have if they had any sense of what irony was.

Canto gave out a yelp. I asked him what the matter was and he said he looked out the window and saw someone. I went to the window and looked outside. There was a man standing in the pouring rain. As I looked closer, however, I noticed that it wasn't really a man. It was too tall, too thin, its arms too long. And then a flash of lightning revealed that it had no face and I saw the Slender Man for a second time.